MEDIA ADVISORY
The Licensing Advisory Committee of the University of Colorado at Boulder has forwarded a recommendation of "qualified support" for a proposal on a Designated Suppliers Program, which is being promoted by a national student organization including the group's CU-Boulder chapter.
The recommendation was submitted on April 18 by Professor William Wei, chair of CU-Boulder's Licensing Advisory Committee, to Vice Chancellor for Administration Paul Tabolt. A copy of the recommendation letter is included below and attached.
The student organization, United Students Against Sweatshops, issued its proposal for the DSP last fall and has been lobbying universities throughout the country to adopt the proposal. The Licensing Advisory Committee's recommendation that CU-Boulder adopt a position of "qualified support" for the DSP is preliminary and is under review by Tabolt. He is expected to make a recommendation to Chancellor Phil DiStefano this week.
For more information contact Barrie Hartman, (303) 735-6183, or William Wei at (303) 492-3378.
April 18, 2006
Dear Vice-Chancellor Tabolt,
As requested, the Licensing Advisory Committee (LAC) has evaluated the United Students Against Sweatshops' proposal for a Designated Suppliers Program (DSP). As part of its deliberations, the LAC has participated in teleconferences, attended national meetings, and read numerous reports and articles pertaining to the DSP. On April 13, 2006, the LAC met to discuss whether the University of Colorado should support the DSP or not.
Although the Licensing Advisory Committee considers the Designated Suppliers Program proposal to be flawed for several reasons, which are outlined below, it recommends that the University of Colorado publicly announce qualified support for the DSP. After several years of monitoring and auditing factories, it is evident that the current approach has had very limited success and a more effective alternative is needed. At the moment, the DSP is really the only alternative available to the University. For that reason, it needs to be taken seriously as a way to improve the lives of workers who produce collegiate apparel goods. (In the wings is the Fair Labor Association's 3.0 proposal that seeks to achieve this through an incentive-based program that increases the capacity of the supply chain, enabling factories to comply with university codes of conduct. However, FLA's 3.0 is still a work in progress.) Besides, qualified public support for the DSP would presumably make the University of Colorado eligible to participate in the Working Group, allowing us to contribute to the development of the DSP. Ideally, the end result would be a program that is workable and, hence, acceptable to the University of Colorado and other colleges and universities.
Qualified public support for the DSP means embracing the DSP goal of improving the lives of workers and declaring the desire to collaborate with the Working Group to design a detailed program that could achieve it. Reference to some of the LAC's concerns is provided here to explain why the University of Colorado is not endorsing the proposal in its entirety. Given the politics surrounding the DSP, the LAC believes it is ill-advised to say that the University of Colorado supports the proposal "in principle" as some of our fellow colleges and universities have done since this has been willfully misconstrued to mean acceptance of some of the specific provisions that are problematic.
It is the LAC's judgment that as it is currently configured the DSP is unworkable. The proposal is wanting in several ways: first, there are doubts that it can be implemented effectively; second, there are concerns that it may have unintended consequences that will adversely affect the lives of workers rather than improve them; and third, there are reservations about its key provisions.
The LAC is reluctant to fully support a proposal that lacks essential details, particularly as to how it would be realized in practice. Perhaps the most important instance of this is its failure to discuss how the proposal intends to elicit the cooperation of the licensees even though it places the primary burden for the success of the program squarely on them. Attaining their cooperation would require their involvement in working through the details of the program. Only through the recent joint forums in Berkeley and Chicago have the voices of the licensees been heard to any meaningful extent. However, those forums did not raise much prospect that major licensees would be willing to carry out the current proposal. If the proposal is to have any "future," it is clear that it needs to involve the licensees in a meaningful way. In all likelihood, this will come about through working with the Fair Labor Association, which works closely with the licensees and has some of them on its governing board.
Not incidentally, the LAC is hardly alone in its concern over the paucity of details. As you know, even those colleges and universities that have stated some sort of public support for the DSP have recognized the inadequacy of the proposal and found it necessary to organize a Working Group to discuss the design and implementation of the proposal. After the Working Group has finished with it, the final proposal may prove to be markedly different from the current document.
Equally troubling is that the proposal may actually prove to be counterproductive when it is carried out. For example, the proposal calls for a "living wage" even though what that is and how it will be determined remains uncertain. Some LAC members are concerned that an artificially-mandated "living wage" as opposed to a market-driven "living wage" may very well result in increased wages for a select few but increased unemployment for many others. Surely that is not the intent of the designers of the DSP though it may very well be a consequence of the program that they have created. It is important that such outcomes be anticipated and addressed before the proposal is implemented.
Another key aspect of the proposal that members of the LAC find problematic is that before a factory can be included in the DSP it has to have "a legitimate, representative labor union, or other representative employee body." (It is the LAC's understanding that the so-called representative employee body was included to allow for the possibility of DSP factories operating in countries where unions are illegal.) No one on the LAC opposes unions per se. On the contrary, the LAC acknowledges that freedom of association, including a worker's "right to form and to join trade unions for the protection of his rights," is a human right, one that is stated in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the United Nations in December 1948. Freedom of Association is also a significant part of the University of Colorado's Code of Conduct. Arguably, in the long run, the empowerment of the workers through their ability to organize themselves to pursue their interests may be the only effective means of improving their lives in any substantial way.
The problem with the current DSP proposal is that it deprives workers of the right not to belong to a union (or a similar body), violating their human rights as well as contradicting the University of Colorado's Code of Conduct. Requiring workers to participate in a union is not necessarily in the interest of the workers. The LAC believes that the choice should be the workers' to make.
In spite of these concerns, the Licensing Advisory Committee recommends that the University of Colorado express qualified support for the Designated Suppliers Program proposal. Adopting such a position would allow CU representatives to participate in the Working Group, providing an opportunity to reshape the DSP into a viable program that will comply with the University of Colorado's Code of Conduct as well as improve the lives of workers.
Sincerely,
William Wei
Chair
Licensing Advisory Committee